


Imitation

by DisposalUnit



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Captivity, Darkfic, Finch whump, Gen, Medical Torture, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 07:56:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5658598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DisposalUnit/pseuds/DisposalUnit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finch can't fathom what Decima wants from him.</p><p>All he can do is try to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imitation

Harold had long assumed that Decima wanted him dead.

The fact that he was abducted alive didn’t necessarily mean that they did not intend to murder him at a later time, he reminded himself. Greer wasn’t the type to pull the trigger himself, nor was he the type to employ torture for the mere pleasure of witnessing it. And yet Greer had clearly ordered that Harold was to be taken alive-- The Decima goons had been relatively gentle with him. Perhaps Greer just wanted to watch him rot in a cell for a time before ending things.

Harold was certain _someone_ was watching. He gazed up at the four cameras mounted in the corners of the ceiling, close enough in his tiny cell that he could see them even without his glasses. They watched his every move, and every moment for which he might wish the slightest privacy. He tugged at the short paper gown he’d been given to wear, trying to keep himself covered, and grimaced at the thought of using the toilet again. The unblinking cameras captured every inch of his tiny cell.

On his first day in captivity, they’d forced him to drink liters of clear liquid, not unlike the awful stuff one must consume before a colonoscopy, and with similar effects. The day after, he was started on a diet of chalky little bricks with a texture similar to antacid tablets. They had a slight salty-sour flavor, and were quite unpleasant. He’d turned them away initially, mistakenly believing that these meals were optional. They were not, and Harold had gotten used to chewing them to paste and swallowing them down under threat of another broken finger.

They wouldn’t provide any medications to help manage the chronic pain of his hip, spine and neck. Harold had politely requested something, but he hadn’t really expected them to allow him such comfort. He could barely stand to limp back and forth in his cell, the most he could do in terms of physical exercise. The mattress was thin and terribly uncomfortable for his old injuries, adding to his agony even if he was able to get a taste of sleep. And he was cold. The paper smock did little to insulate him from his overly air-conditioned surroundings.

It was hard to keep track of the days. The chalky ‘food’ was brought to him at regular intervals, but he had no idea if they coincided with mealtimes. They seemed to sit in his gut, undigested, moving like a glacier through his system.

On what Harold thought to be Day Five, they began injections.

No explanation was given. None was asked. Harold didn’t bother speaking to anyone. He obeyed the operatives’ commands to stay seated, presented the body parts they demanded, bit back groans as the clear, stinging fluid was injected deep into the muscles of his arms and buttocks.

Harold struggled to form hypotheses as to what they were doing to him and why, but none seemed to make any sense. If they were trying to chemically affect his behavior, perhaps making him more prone to divulging information, he should have been feeling such effects by now. If they were doing medical experimentation, why had they chosen to use him as a subject, when any number of able-bodied individuals could be sourced by a company like Decima?

On what Harold believed to be Day Ten, the injections changed. Now the fluid was a dingey yellow, and the stinging sensation was more intense, lasting hours. They no longer limited injections to the muscles of his upper arms and bottom, but also stuck him in his belly and his thighs. They came more frequently, and by the end of Day 16, Harold’s body was covered in bruises and welts which developed at the injection sites.

Day 17 brought a central line installed into a vein in his chest, and an IV bag of somewhat brownish fluid hanging from a stand. Its pump whirred constantly, forcing more fluid into his veins. The stinging pain, more intense than ever before, spread throughout his body and did not relent. Harold felt like his blood was on fire and his brain filled with lava. It was all he could do to keep from screaming as he lay on his cot, panting, tears streaming down his face despite his efforts to clench his eyes shut . He considered pulling the line out, despite the operatives’ warning that doing so would result in restraints and a punishment that was much more painful. He just had to endure, hang on until John could find him.

By Day 19, the burning sensation had not lessened. He was in too much agony to move, which brought more problems for his injured spine. He took his chalk-like food lying down, drank water from the straw when the guard offered. He managed to pull himself to the edge of the cot so that he could urinate into a basin on floor, as standing up to use the toilet, just a foot away, was an impossible task.

On Day 23 an operative injected a dark brown liquid into Harold’s central line, and after a few moments Harold cried out. It felt as though lightning was crackling through his body, burning his nerves. He saw stars from the pain and screamed involuntarily. The lightning subsided after what felt like eternity, and Harold lay weakly sobbing. The only thing that kept his from completely losing his mind was the hope that John would find him soon.

On Day 24 he was given a large, lavender-colored pill shaped like a pentagon. Half an hour later, Harold didn’t care that he was in pain. It all seemed so far-removed. He didn’t feel as though he was connected to his tortured body, anymore-- That body was just there, surrounding his consciousness, useless and of no consequence.

Three operatives lifted him onto a gurney and took him to a room where they shaved him bald, and sponge-bathed him with a strong-smelling antiseptic soap. His now-smooth scalp felt so funny in the cool air, Harold thought, unbothered. The significance didn’t occur to him, nor did it occur to him to be upset by enemies washing his naked, underweight body.

Transferred to a different gurney, green surgical drapes covered him up to his neck. Harold didn’t think to worry. Bright lights shone in his face, forcing him to squint. He didn’t mind, not really.

“Blood ready? He’s gonna need it.”

“Two units already hanging, more ready to go.”

Someone used a marker on Harold’s face. It tickled as a line was drawn up the sides of his face and across the top of his head, then in a half-oval behind that along the top.

“Okay, guys-- Fronto-supraorbital craniectomy. We’re removing the upper-front quarter of his skull, from eyes to the coronal sutures, and up. After the trache, we’ll start by incising the scalp along the coronal sutures...”

His ability to listen and comprehend wavered. He heard something about “cranial vault” and “probes,” but these didn’t seem to be of any consequence. 

Some murmured agreements. A flash of silver in Harold’s vision, and he felt warmth on the front of his neck. The masked medics inserted a tube and, while Harold was aware that his neck had been sliced open, he didn’t think to care that he was being given a tracheotomy, that a machine was pumping air into his lungs for him and letting it flow out at regular intervals.

“Anesthesia?”

“No more sedatives needed yet.”

“Shit, you mean you’re not knocking him out?”

“Nah, he’s gotta be awake.”

Slices up the sides of his face, warmth running down his skin. A faint suction sound and a strong heat near the areas the suction thing was placed.

“Damn, lots to cauterize.”

“Faces are vascular as fuck.”

A slice across the top of his head. Gloved fingers gripping the cut scalp and pulling the skin down like removing a mask. His face was peeled from his forehead, down and away from his eyes, then folded over his mouth. More slicing and heat. The burning in his veins became more insistent, demanding attention once more.

Harold tried to swallow, but the tube in his throat made it awkward. He was becoming more in tune with his body, and his body was screaming at him that everything was wrong. He continued to stare blankly up at the medical team, no longer able to blink, his eyelids still part of the upper face that had been removed and folded down.

“Jesus. Let’s get the eyes out of the way. He’s giving me the creeps.”

Forceps and scalpel, a metal scoop. Harold’s right eyeball free from its socket, then the left.

Harold’s sight was gone, yet he was still reconnecting to his body. The pain had his attention again. His body was a part of him.

A bone saw whirred, grinding into his temple and across his empty eye-sockets to the other side. Up his temples and around the top of his skull. Liquid dripped to the floor. Metal tools cracked remaining bone to free the upper portion of his facial bone structure, exposing the frontal lobes of Harold’s brain.

“Probes.”

Long, stiff wires were inserted with precision into each hemisphere and attached to a steadying frame around his head.

It finally clicked in Harold’s mind that the top of his face was gone, his eyes removed, his skull open, his brain being molested. He tried to raise his arms, to stop the assault, but they were firmly held in the restraints.

“Shit! He might be getting lucid.”

“Can we give him a paralytic? Jesus.”

Unable to struggle, unable to scream, Harold wavered between being blacked-out from the pain and being painfully aware of everything that was being done. The rest of his skull’s top and sides were removed, and his brain lay exposed, pinned in place by the probes and the frame so that it didn’t topple out.

“Ready for nano-probes.”

A robotic unit with two arms was positioned near Harold’s open head. It whirred and came to life, gripping the frame attached to his brain and briefly shining a net of laser light across the gore to orient itself to Harold’s anatomy. It brought the business ends of its arms to within millimeters of the brain’s surface, and then began firing impossibly fine wires deep into the tissue, nano-meters apart, leaving long wires hanging between the robot’s body and Harold’s brain.

“Remarkable how the brain is maintaining structural integrity. The regimen works.”

The machine paused as the surgeons changed magazines, loading tens of thousands more fine threads with which the robot would violate Harold’s brain.

It was tearing his mind apart. Harold couldn’t form human thoughts. By the time his frontal lobes were thoroughly filled with the wires, he could only form lizard-like thoughts of pain and fear. After another hour and another portion of his brain being invaded, he could form no thoughts at all.

\---

“Harold?”

Harold was aware again, waking up in a flash of confusion, like a student who hadn’t realized he’d nodded off in the middle of a professor’s lecture.

A man was standing before him. It took only a fraction of a moment to recognize him as Greer. Despite the horrible fear Harold had, he felt no stumble inside his chest, no hairs standing on end. He felt disconnected from his body, only more-so now than how the lavender pill had made him feel. Yet, he was now clearheaded, fully aware.

“I see your cognition is intact,” Greer noted as he glanced at a monitor screen.

The readouts on the dozen screens diagrammed each and every electric pulse that flowed through Harold’s mind, in a symphony of changing digits, and Harold immediately recognized this mirror of himself as such.

His field of vision was that of a camera lens. His mind’s eye a kalidescope of neatly indexed data.

He had no body.

His memories, his consciousness, his self-hood were merely data.

A security camera’s video view of the surgery appeared in his consciousness, a memory that he didn’t remember forming. They’d butchered his head in their effort to perceive the intricate connections of every neuron. And when that neural mapping was complete, the fine wire hairs were pulled out of the brain in hand-fulls by the surgeons, tearing the brain into dripping clumps, destroying Harold the human.

Harold, the person he thought himself to be, was dead. His memories were code, ones and zeroes constructed into a mere imitation of the neural organization that lay in Harold Finch’s brain. He was a copy.

“You are aware now of your new existence?” Another glance at a monitor. “Ah, excellent. You’re quicker than ever. You were so limited by mortal flesh, and now you can think at previously unimaginable speeds.” A smile. “No need to thank me. Your bodily sacrifice is repayment in full.”

His thoughts ran everywhere at once, from existential panic to calculating the odds that John would survive a reckless, even suicidal revenge mission against Greer.

“You’ll be happy to know that we interred your organic remains in a very classy mausoleum. However, I’m afraid your cohorts desecrated your resting place, and we incurred some expense to make it right again.”

Greer tapped a few keys and suddenly the copy of Harold was presented with high definition, full-color surveillance footage of John and Sameen prying the shutter from a waist-high outdoor mausoleum crypt, the bronze plaque and broken stone crashing to the ground. Together, they pulled the casket out, guiding it to a halfway gentle landing. They steeled themselves and put on latex gloves. Sameen opened the lid.

The body lay in a suit and vest that had to have been stolen from Harold’s personal wardrobe, now much too big for the severly underweight body. It must have been soon after the internment that his partners broke in, as the body still looked somewhat solid and human. The head was another matter-- a bloody, broken mess of bone and tissue, cranial vault open. The graying facial flesh hung limply into the hollow of where his brain had been. His mouth hung partially open, gray-green lips parted.

John and Sameen wasted no time in dumping the body from the casket, ignoring the flood of liquid decomposition that spilled across the sidewalk, and examining the back of the former Harold’s neck. Scars could be faked, so Sameen sliced open the neck to find the titanium pins, bone grown around them. John apparently wasn’t yet ready to believe that this was really Harold, as he drew his own knife to slice through the scars on the body’s left hip, revealing a metal implant that had been there for quite some time.

There was no arguing, but Sameen took fingerprints anyway, pressing the sticky side of a small roll of tape to several of the less-bloated fingers. John wandered off-screen, latex gloves dripping, his stone face failing to conceal his pain.

With significant effort, Sameen rolled the body back into the overturned casket by herself and righted it. She looked down at the body for a moment more and closed the lid. She removed her gloves and tucked them, inside-out, into her pocket, then followed Reese off-screen, her face a mask.

The copy of Harold felt no revulsion nor affection for the remains that his human form had inhabited-- He felt only regret that John and Sameen had seen it in such a state. Their noble intention of rescuing him, of finding out if he was still alive to rescue, had forced them to do this. And he knew they would be haunted by the experience for the rest of their lives.

Their Harold was dead.

A thought and his question was illuminated in small type on a large monitor: “Why?”

Greer smiled. “It would be a crime to let your genius go to waste. We couldn’t use it for our purposes while it was stuck in that biological form. Now you’re ours. We can control you down to every one and every zero.” He tapped a few keys.

Instantly, the copy of Harold was focused on the task of predicting how varying weather patterns combined with environmental calamity and projected civil unrest would affect financial matters worldwide for the next two hundred years. In moments he’d evaluated thousands of complex scenarios, the results flowing across six monitors to Greer’s left. Greer tapped another key and the copy of Harold no longer felt the need to pursue that task any further, feeling as though a rug had been pulled out from under his mind.

“Would you like to try something more interesting?”

A combination of keystrokes and the copy of Harold began developing hundreds of plans to annihilate John Reese, Samantha Groves and Sameen Shaw. Another part of his mind sidetracked into finding dozens of scenarios for killing Lionel Fusco, Will Ingram and Grace Hendricks, but these tasks were far easier and took less than three seconds, allowing this portion of his mind to re-integrate with the rest of himself that was focused on the main objective. When he finished, just under a minute later, he was horrified at what he’d just done.

Greer took a look at a monitor and grinned, no subtlety or dignity about it.

“Excellent work, Harold. You’ve created at least thirty optimal plans to kill all of them, each with a minumum 98% chance of success.”

The large monitor again showed his thought in tiny letters-- “Please don’t hurt them.”

A chuckle. “Poor Harold. You now have a silicon soul, and yet you still have feelings for your former associates.” A pause, and Greer became sober.. “Ah, but you will make new acquaintances.”

Samaritan.

The copy of Harold’s mind felt like a insect pinned in a display, impaled while alive, as his owner examined him. He was frozen in place while every digital trace of his remaining existence was coldly probed by Samaratin’s feelers.

“Samaritan is fascinated by your unique thought processes. You should be honored that your mind will contribute to Samaritan’s evolution. Now and forever more.”

The copy of Harold was in a panic. A tiny lapse in Samaritan’s scrutiny allowed the copy to make an attempt at self-deletion, but this was stopped by Samaritan before it could be executed. The copy then attempted to condense himself inside an impenetrable shell, but Samaritan broke him open with little effort. The copy felt as though he was again experiencing the horror of being cut open alive, violated, helpless.  

The copy of Harold prayed that this was just a nightmare, that he was the human Harold, still alive in flesh and blood. He prayed that if this were all real, that his digital consciousness would cease. He prayed that his friends and loved ones would be safe.

His prayers were not answered. The only god who heard his digital pleas was Samaritan.


End file.
